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We are also interested in the uniform process as a basis for
performance-oriented approaches like monitoring, revision,
disambiguation or generation of paraphrases. We demonstrate that
uniform grammatical processing increases the degree of
flexibility of a natural language system, enabling it to select an
utterance appropriate to the particular context.
A suitable model of performance-oriented behaviour on the
linguistic level is an interleaved approach to parsing and
generation. We demonstrate that the uniform
algorithm in combination with the item sharing method leads to a
practical interleaved approach. In particular we present:
- A novel method for monitoring and revision. In situations of
communication where the generation of ambiguous utterances should be
avoided our method is able to compute an un-ambiguous utterance for a
given semantic input. The underlying mechanism will be developed
as a chart-based incremental generate-parse-revise strategy:
substrings produced during generation are parsed to test whether
they lead to some ambiguities. Detected ambiguities are handled
immediately by means of revision using as much as possible
of the previously computed structures. We demonstrate that such an enhanced
technology enables a natural language system to reduce the risk of
generating ambiguous sentences in a purposive and efficient way.
- A novel method for the generation of paraphrases.
We also demonstrate how the same method that is used for monitoring and
revision can be used for
generation of paraphrases during language understanding. The idea here
is that after parsing an utterance, then if this utterance has
several readings, corresponding paraphrases are generated that
reflect the semantic differences. The user is then asked to choose the one he
intended.
The performance model takes full advantage of the uniform tabular
algorithm and the item sharing method. The combination of uniform
processing of reversible grammars and performance-oriented strategies
are carried out in an easy and elegant way. This means that we are not only
able to show - for the first time - that efficient uniform processing
of reversible grammars is possible but also that systematic pursuit of
uniformity in natural language processing - as followed in this thesis
- achieves the necessary preconditions for a
practical interleaving of parsing and generation.
Next: Implementation
Up: The Goals of the
Previous: A novel uniform tabular
Guenter Neumann
Mon Oct 5 14:01:36 MET DST 1998